I spent a bit over six years working with my local rescue mission. The pay stinks but the stories are great.

The people I worked with were for the most part, a more raw than usual mix of the basic ingredients of human nature; tragically flawed of course, creative and resourceful, desperate and broken, naive yet hardened, wise yet somehow foolish beyond measure.

One of the guys I got to know was Jack. Jack was half Native American - I believe Lakota Sioux. He grew up in a hard drinking military family - mostly in Germany. He, as an adult, showed all the signs of fetal alcohol syndrome - he was tall and lanky, and had the sluggish speech of a brain drenched in alcohol.

Somehow as a teenager, he had taken to hopping freight trains around Europe. When his family moved back to the States, he kept doing what he knew best - riding the rails.

I was told that he had a wall sized railroad map of North America in his low rent subsidized apartment where he had marked all the routes he had traveled. He kept the schedules in a notebook or in his head. He was sort of an Idiot Savant of the rails.

I would usually see Jack every month or so and he would tell me where he had been - usually across to the far coasts, Florida, New York, southern California, Canada, Alaska - depending on the season or his mood. He would tell me, for one thing, I was one of the few people who would talk to him, in his laconic, drifting sing-songy voice about where he had been, the weather, the conditions, the security people he ran into.

He wasn't trying to impress me, and I mean this in an almost complimentary way - he wasn't smart enough to lie. He just told it straight.

One time, after a few months, I ran into Jack...

"Hey, Jack, where you been?" This was my usual question.

"Oh, I been to Japan".

"Japan! How'd you get to Japan?"

"Oh, I took the southbound freight to LA and then stowed aboard a freighter ship. Then I hopped some trains around Japan for a few weeks and then got on another freighter and caught a northbound freight train back home."

I could hardly believe what he was telling me.

"Did you have a passport or a visa?" I realized, as I was asking, how ridiculous my question was. Jack clearly lived in a parallel universe where standard rules and paperwork did not apply.

Jack gave me a huge grin - as if I were some kind of idiot - "No, don't need no passport".

Hmmmm....this was a year or two after September 11th. How could this guy drift across the country - and even cross national borders without even considering the normal means of passage or official tracking?

I left our conversation, puzzled and inspired - not sure if I should be horrified that our borders were so porous, or ecstatic that this Tom Saywer type simpleton could outwit every absurdly expensive customs, border and security system out there.